Tuesday, August 2, 2016

YAHOO GETS HACKED: 200 million users now have their private data offered for sale

On the TheRealDel dark web market, private data from 200 million Yahoo users is becoming a great hit!

What’s the price? As it seems this set is being sold for 3 bitcoins which is a little bit over $1,860.

For now it looks as a great deal since the package apparently contains all need info such us: username, MD5-hashed password, date of birth, backup email addresses and etc.

This set has been sold by “peace_of_mind” (aka “Peace”) who has been known for great deals such us the ones with VK, Tumblr, iMesh and other online services.

Even though the confirmation from Yahoo is still pending, Peace is known for selling huge sets of data from known online service providers so there is a great possibility that this is a real thing and he even said that he was trading with this data privately before publishing it online.

As it has already happened with his previous data sets they were from old data breaches. Even this data from Yahoo users is from 2012 so probably a lot of these accounts are not even in use anymore.

According to HELP Net Security, all these data sets that Peace was selling online were apparently all dumped by a “Russian group” in 2012. Peace just used the data, took advantage and earned $65,000.

This whole situation is under investigation by Yahoo but they have underlined that they invest in their users’ safety. Moreover, they keep advising users to use stronger passwords or to switch using Yahoo Account Key and drop passwords altogether.